31 Aug
2012
31 Aug
'12
10:48 a.m.
On 31 Aug 2012 at 17:24, Shoppa, Tim wrote:
I briefly used one of the Corvus cards with a VHS machine. It wasn't
that great--I moved to a QIC backup system and never looked back. I
think I gave away the card, but I may still have the software
somewhere. I'll have a look when I get a chance.
--Chuck
I've got
this old 8-bit ISA card on my "interesting to try out"
list. Corvus had a videotape backup and then later a device called
the Bank, but the processing for what hardware I saw was "dumb" just
support logic. The cpu of the PC did the heavy lifting. The Bank
used a corvus network node, I think to communicate, so there was
only a corvus net card in the backup server and software to support
the bank hardware. I think Alpha Micro had a product too. Their
surplus showed up here in Orange County for a while when they
crashed and burned but no software, sorry, also they had no
coprocessor either.
And a little higher up on the mini scale, Digidata had a product
called the "Gigastore" that was a VHS tape unit interfaced by a Q-bus
card and a variant of the Pertec Formatted (two 50 pin cable) tape
interface popular for 9-track and some other drives. I used and
recovered data from these way back in the 90's.